I have been traveling the world as a journalist and passionate lover of all things fun for 20 years. I have had weekly columns in USA Today and Investors Business Daily, published thousands of articles in leading magazines from Playboy to Popular Science, and am the author of Getting Into Guinness. I am the Contributing Travel Editor for Cigar Aficionado Magazine, the restaurant columnist for USAToday.com, and am a co-founder of TheAPosition.com, the leading golf travel website. I love every kind of travel, active, cultural and leisurely, and my special areas of expertise are luxury hotels and resorts, golf, skiing, food, wine and spirits. I tweet @TravelFoodGuy

A Craft Distillery Worthy Of The Word 'Craft'

Craft distilling doesn’t get much more ‘craft’ than growing your own heirloom potatoes and getting them into the distillery within 48 hours of harvest.

When it comes to making spirits, smaller does not necessarily mean better – in fact it usually means worse.

I know this is going to upset a lot of people who are emotionally invested in the various “artisanal” and “craft” food and beverage movements sweeping the world right now, but it is the truth.

Most of what are widely considered the finest spirits in the world, things like The Macallan, Talisker, Oban or Lagavulin single malt Scotch whiskies; Johnnie Walker Blue or Chivas Royal Salute ultra-blend whiskies; Maker’s Mark or Knob Creek bourbons; Hennessey cognacs, and many others, are made by very big companies, yet consistently remain near best in class. One thing they all have in common is experience and specificity: you will never, ever find The Macallan distillery cranking out vodka in between batches of its superlative whisky, or the copper pot stills that craft the Caribbean’s best rums being fired up to make a quick batch of gin.

Yet that is exactly what many small-scale “boutique” distillers do, treating spirits as a commodity process, only on a smaller scale than their bigger counterparts. After a load of neutral spirits arrives, bought from another distillery, some might use it to make vodka today and gin tomorrow, slapping on a cool label showing it was made in “small batch” fashion.

I’m not saying there are no good craft distilleries, not by a long shot. I’ve had excellent products from several, most notably the Woodinville Whiskey Co., in Woodinville, WA – which makes excellent whiskey, in extra small barrels for more wood contact. The popular High West Distillery in Park City UT is bit more hit and miss in its broader product line, but some of its limited edition whiskies are excellent. I enjoyed Hudson Whiskey’s “Baby Bourbon,” made by Tuthilltown Spirits with 100% local corn in upstate New York and aged in tiny oak barrels. I even had a white rum, Owney’s, made in Brooklyn from domestic all-natural non-GMO molasses that I expected to hate (few high quality rums are made from molasses, they are made from sugar cane, and I am not partial to white rums) but I was pleasantly surprised. Owney’s is made by a female distiller from my native Queens in very small-batch runs, and her distillery, The Noble Experiment NYC, is currently moving on to whiskies.

So far Woody Creek has only sold its ultra-premium vodka, made from 100% potatoes, which it grows itself, using varieties indigenous to Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley.

But all of these are happy exceptions. I’ve been to a number of new “boutique” distilleries, and most of what I have tasted doesn’t taste very good, and certainly isn’t an improvement over widely available established “big” brands. I have yet to test a domestic, non-Caribbean dark or gold rum that is even as good as Bacardi 8-year old or Myer’s Dark, let alone in the same league as something like Zacapa, Oronoco or their ilk. I’ve yet to try a domestic gin that I’d pour before Beefeater - as mass-produced a brand as there is. Yet when I visited the Beefeater distillery and got to spend time with Master Distiller Desmond Payne, I learned a lot about the competitive advantage a company like Beefeater has in sourcing its botanicals, the ingredients that make gin gin (I wrote at length about British gins here for Forbes.com). First and foremost is juniper, which has extremely limited production, almost of all of it in Italy, where Payne has been buying large amounts of top quality, hand harvested juniper berries for many years, and his previous distillers before him for decades. Besides Italy, he travels to Spain to personally inspect harvests of Seville oranges and select rinds, to Japan to taste test tea leaves used in Beefeater 24, and so on, around the world, sourcing regular supply chains of excellence that I can’t imagine many mom and pop distilleries can afford to replicate versus Beefeater’s budget and buying power.

With a substantial investment in custom stills from Germany’s Carl, Woody Creek can do what most small distilleries cannot: produce high-proof neutral spirits in a single distillation.

Where small distillers can excel is by creating their own supply chain, and that is exactly what Woody Creek Distillers in Colorado is doing – and what sets it dramatically apart from the vast majority of “craft distilleries” (Tuthilltown Spirits in New York, for one, makes vodka from local farmers’ apples and whiskey from locally grown grain and corn). Woody Creek, near Aspen, to date has specialized in vodka, made entirely from fresh potatoes, which they grow and harvest themselves. Because they grow winter rye as a cover crop from fall to spring, when it is not potato season in Colorado, they are currently making rye whiskey with their own rye. They’ve also made very small quantities of infused eau du vie and apple brandy, with apples and fruits grown by their neighbors. For their next project, a more traditional whiskey, they are using solely malted barley grown in Colorado. For their bourbon-style product, they will use a non-GMO Colorado sweet corn variety known as Olathe. “Interest in natural, fresh and organic ingredients is so high right now and we decided to go that route,” said Mark Kleckner, COO and co-founder. But for their most intriguing project, they introduced a rare super vodka potato not previously grown in this country.

“Our model is simple: use the highest quality equipment and practices along with the best possible ingredients,” said Kleckner. “We are vodka guys,” said Kleckner of himself and Pat Scanlan, one of his two partners, a former engineer for NASA and the Defense Department who does the potato growing, “and we thought Chopin was the best of the potato vodkas on the market, and we wanted to create a super-Chopin, so we started doing research. We found out that Chopin was using cellared potatoes much of the time, and potatoes dehydrate and lose quality quickly. Most US distillers, even small ones, who use potatoes are using older or second potatoes, or even starting with dehydrated potatoes or neutral sprits from potatoes. We decided to approach it like a vintage product – great French wineries don’t use old or seconds grapes. We grow our own potatoes, harvest and mash the same or next day, and hand distill each small batch. We do it all ourselves, with planting in May and starting the harvest around Labor Day.” For about two months, Scanlan harvests 12 tons of potatoes each day, which Kleckner distills, using potatoes that have never been out of the earth for more than 48 hours. “When we’re out of potatoes for the season, we stop making vodka.” It’s that simple – and that rare.

The only product currently on the market is Woody Creek’s Signature Potato Vodka, made from 100% potatoes, mainly Rio Grande, a variety indigenous to Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, which has a long tradition of prodigious potato excellence – at one time the valley produced more potatoes than all of Idaho, says Kleckner. During the silver boom trains brought in miners and equipment, and left full of potatoes bound for the rest of the country, but when the silver dried up, so did potato farming. Scanlan planted seven historic varieties and they made vodka from all and in combination before settling primarily on Rio Grande as the best. “It’s not at all what you’d expect – the classic reaction we get at the tasting room is, ‘I’m not a straight vodka drinker, but this is great.’ We call it a sipping vodka.”

Woody Creek started growing a rare variety of Polish potato that is excellent for vodka making in order to create its Reserve Vodka, which will soon be sold at the distillery tasting room in Basalt, CO.

“It is important to me to control every step of the process, and in every batch we can toss out the heads and tails and keep the heart (of the distillate). We spent a lot of money on the Maybach of stills, a custom-made Carl system from Germany, who has been making them for centuries. We have two 34-foot rectifying columns and we can get it to a high enough proof in one distillation. 95% of you craft distilleries don’t have the capability to make neutral spirits, the base for vodka and gin. You have to have a still that’s capable of getting to the legal minimum of 190 proof. When you see a vodka that says ‘distilled 9 times,’ that’s not a good thing. It means they have to keep distilling it again to get the alcohol content high enough, and that strips the taste. With our still, we get a European-style vodka with all the potato flavor left in it – it’s distilled once and unfiltered. And we don’t have to add anything. Many commercial vodkas add up to 2% essence of lemongrass and other essences and chemicals just to put some flavor and mouth feel back into the vodka.”

With the word craft being tossed around, I think a distillery that is this vertically integrated, so careful about it ingredients that it grows them itself, certainly qualifies. Distilleries using locally sourced ingredients from farmers they know are still in the minority, but distilleries growing their own ingredients are almost non-existent. But for its next trick, they are trying to raise the vodka bar even higher (I have to admit, as I’ve written in this column before, vodka is my least favorite spirit and one I very rarely drink, despite being the number one spirit in the US, so I am not Woody Creek’s target customer – at least until its first whiskies come out of aging in charred new oak barrels in 2015).

“When we were researching Chopin, we found that they use this very particular Polish variety of potato called stobrawa. It’s a very high starch potato, twice as much as your garden variety russet, with really unique characteristics that give vodka made from it a great mouth feel, but it had never been grown in this country.” Woody Creek Distillers worked with professors at the University of Wisconsin, which had some strobrawa matter, and the University of Colorado’s potato specialist, and the researchers were able to produce 6,000 micro-tubers of the potato, which Woody Creek planted, then used the first harvest for seed. This year, most of harvest is again going back into seed, but they have enough to make a very limited release of their Reserve Vodka, from 100% strobrawa potatoes. “We have to save most of our crop for next year, and it’s probably something we’ll do as an annual holiday release in limited quantities at first. 2013 will be the first year we sell it, and it will probably be in our tasting room by early summer. The bottles, which we designed specially, are being made right now. It probably won’t be sold offsite.”

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Not sure why you would use Woody Creek as an example. Their vodka scored average at San Francisco World Spirits Competition. No better than NGS with a label slapped on it. Silver medal.

If you want to see some craft distilleries doing a great job with better quality than major vodka brands, checkout Maine Distilleries, Alaska Distillery, Dry Fly, Grand Teton. Those craft distilleries have all scored Double Gold at the top competition in the world in San Francisco.

There are plenty of small craft distilleries putting out average quality spirits. Woody Creek is not one of them. They are remarkably average.

Thomas, My point was the artisanal aspect of craft, controlling the process all the way from ingredients, not the bizarro world of spirit awards. Woody Creek is a perfect example of this start to finish artisanal process, so if you are not sure why I chose them, that’s why.

Your first paragraph was a point about smaller not always being better. So the initial point of the article was that big companies are making better whiskey than smaller companies, likely due to the time and capital required to age whiskey. That is a valid point to make and on target with observations of other whiskey experts that the craft whiskeys are not yet as good as some of the major brands.

But then you switched to vodka and were trying to make a point about a good craft vodka. But you picked a craft vodka that is average and scoring no better than major brands.

If the point of your article is to find a craft spirit doing it better than major brands, why didn’t you pick one that is actually doing better than major brands? The example cited seemed not relevant to the point of the article.

Cold River Potato Vodka has been doing the estate potato vodka process (they own the farm, distill the potatoes, bottle it, etc) for years and has scored at the top of the charts. Woody Creek is just a poor example of the point you are trying to make.

Thomas, Thanks for reading but I think I know the point I was trying to make better than you do, and it was about the artisinal craft process and controlling that in a hands on way as much as possible, not about product ratings as you suggest. I never mentioned any “best” vodkas, nor would I, since I think vodka is far and away the least interesting spirit and I very rarely drink it.

Larry, I do appreciate your article. There is a ton of ‘junk’ out there regardless of whether it’s “craft” or not. Craft distilleries though are the ones that are changing the industry and pushing it along. I like to see that now there are folks nipping at the tails of the larger houses, they too are looking to innovate and in some cases brand themselves a bit differently.

Our distillery, apart from being one of the few that uses organic raw honey in our spirits, builds much of our equipment on site. No Carl still from Germany, but stainless steel ones from Ohio and modified and updated at our beautiful distillery in Vermont. Come and visit sometime.

The author Larry Olmsted seems sloppy on his research. Numerous facts wrong in this piece. Is it that difficult to do some research before you print such carelessly written junk? Woodinville Whiskey makes vodka also. Peabody Jones Vodka.

http://www.proof66.com/vodka/peabody-jones-organic-vodka.html

And you go from criticizing distilleries for making multiple type of spirits (gin, vodka, whiskey) on the same stills, to then praising Woody Creek Distillery? They are committing the same supposed sin of multiple products on the same equipment.

This article is really poorly conceived, sloppy research on this “facts” and just way off target.

I enjoyed reading your article. The next time you’re in Brooklyn please feel free to stop by the Jack From Brooklyn distillery where we produce Sorel Hibiscus Liqueur. We’d love to give you the tour! www.JackFromBrooklyn.com

So…where do you want me to send the bottles? I’m amazed that you claim that you haven’t found a domestic dark rum that surpasses Bacardi 8 or Meyers! I’d like to send you our 3 yr and 10 yr rum to help enlighten you as to what we are doing here in Louisiana. Old New Orleans Rum has been produced by Celebration Distillation just outside of the French Quarter since the late ’90′s. We exclusively produce rum made from a locally sourced molasses in small batches. The fermentation, distilling, aging, spice infusions (for our spiced rum), barrel blending, filtering, and bottling are all done on-site. We survived 9 ft of flood water from Hurricane Katrina as did a handful of our barrels. I’d love to send you some to try, but on one condition…if it changes your mind on domestic rum production, you owe me a feature! Erick Lewko, Director of Sales www.oldneworleansrum.com www.drinkgingeroo.com